The history of Julian has been employed as an apologue by more than one writer when satirising some religious reaction of his day. A well-known living theological critic of Germany uses it as a cloak for an attack on the late King of Prussia, and English clergymen under the reign of James II., assailing the religious tendencies of the King, denounced him as another Julian the Apostate. Such comparisons may serve their immediate purpose, but they are almost always misleading, and may be very unjust. I think, however, that we may, with advantage, compare this Pagan reaction in the Roman empire under Julian with the Papal reaction in England under Mary. The two sovereigns, indeed, have little in common except their manifest sincerity, but the general relations and the ultimate effects of the two movements are not so very dissimilar. They both interposed after a very decided predominance of the opposite cause; they both were a return to the forms of the past; they both involved a reversal of the traditional policy of the reigning house; they both were short in duration, but resolute, uncompromising, energetic in action; and they both proved utterly futile in the result, because they were unsupported by any deep feeling in the mass of the people. So far as they produced any effects at all, they served only to nerve the energies and reassure the confidence of their antagonists. Julian was now thirty years old when the death of Constantius left him sole master of the Roman empire. In stature he was rather below the average height; his frame was muscular and strong; his shoulders were unusually broad; his neck was thick and arched; he had a bright and piercing eye--the family characteristic which was so remarkable in his uncle Constantine; the upper part of his face, the brow, and the nose were fine and well chiselled; his mouth was too large, and his lower lip hung disagreeably. He wore a rough, pointed beard, the usual appendage of philosophers. Of his personal appearance he was studiously careless. It would almost seem as though the courtly dignity and scrupulous neatness of his cousin Constantius had produced a revulsion in him. He ostentatiously vaunts his unpolished manner and his slovenly habits. He was signally undignified in all his gestures. Of his excitability and his restlessness of manner I have already spoken. He was a hurried, reckless talker. His tongue, we are told, was never at rest. His energy was enormous. During his administration of Gaul, when his days had been spent in the anxieties of government or in the toils of war, he would sit up half the night studying or writing. When he became Emperor his energy seemed only to increase. The great purpose of his life, the restoration and reform of Paganism, was now definitely before him, and he worked at it with a determination which never slackened. Into a short reign of eighteen months he crowded an amount of work which probably no sovereign has ever surpassed.